IRIX and Software

I have ISO files of Irix 6.5.30 overlays, im currently running Irix 6.5.23 on my Octane, I would like to update my system to 6.5.30 and im trying to figure out how i can do this from these isos. I dont have a cdrom so i cant just burn the discs unfortunately.

Is there a way to mount the ISOs or extract the contents so they will be usable for updating to irix 6.5.30?


Thanks

Not from within IRIX, as IRIX doesn't have a loopback device driver. You can do it with Linux, BSD, MacOS X, OpenVMS, and maybe Windows and then pull the files out and move them over to IRIX.

Note that this is for a true ISO "ISO." If it's in fact an EFS CD image things get more complex. Linux will read them, or you'll be writing them out to disk.

Winzip will extract most iso's then you can ftp over the entire directory structure. Drag the bottom-level folder icon onto the dropbox of swmgr and it should update you. Or the top-level, depending on which end you are looking from

You can actually read the ISOs on an SGI, if you have a spare harddrive connected and just dd the .iso over the entire drive. IT may be neccessary to run scsiha or fx or something similar to re-read the partition table on that disk. That should work both for proper, bootable EFS images as well for normal iso 9660 images.

Ooh. How about a big CF disk in a firewire reader, format the card xfs, and dd the image onto it ? Seems like that should work ?

It should
You don't even need to format it with xfs, since dd overwrites the filesystem anyways.

On an O3k the CD is connected via Firewire, so the system knows how to boot from it. If SGI kept this feature in the O300 and Tezro machines, it should be possible to boot IRIX CD images this way or even have the system disk on a CF card and use it as an SSD without the huge cost of SATA->SCSI adapters and similar.

I have noticed that. I wonder if a firewire DVD-Writer would work on an O3xxx ?


Hmmm .... that's an interesting idea Not sure what use it would be but fun to play with, for sure !

I haven't tried that, but there's a chance it might work

In my Origin the CD drive is connected via an IDE->FireWire adapter and IRIX sees it as a SCSI device. This is the stock drive that SGI put in there: http://www.teac.co.jp/dspd/product/optical/cd-540e.html .


All disk accesses would be really fast, since the seek time is practically zero, and it would use less power. If you choose a high-end CF card and the FireWire adapter can handle it, the system would boot in a few seconds instead of a minute or so.

If you want to read an ISO, you can skip the formatting and partitioning. Just dd the entire iso to /dev/rdsk/dks?d?vol, not into a partition thereon.

Damn ! I was all excited about trying this but just realized, no firewire in the O350. Not enough slots. You're going to have to give it a shot and report back, Mr Canavan.

I haven't tried that with a firewire device, but that's basically the method I used to find out how to make bootable installation CDs, or produce UDF images to burn to DVDs. The same principle should apply to ISOs.